At least once Atelier Escha & Logy and Shallie + come out that poor thing can rest assured I won't try to cram too much more into it...sans the two Trails games when SC comes out and I can finally play them both...

And here I thought handhelds were supposed to be cheaper with less work than a console. XP

A look at Metacritic says 45 for the original and 71 for Re:Birth1. That is a huge leap in quality. You are entitled to your oppinion but doesn't seem like many agree looking at the score.

I cannot say since I never played the first game.

Playing the original would greatly help you there. ;-P

Re;birth only is getting praise because:

1) Massive graphical update; in that the original had virtually no graphics to begin with. For example, anything that wasn't a party member or primary antagonist used a greyed out silhouette. No 2D art, no 3D models, for the ENTIRE game.

2) Streamlined combat. Not good combat. Streamlined. Old Neptunia had most people thumbing through menus for days.

Because of that of course the meta scores are going to be substantially higher. Even if the core 'bad' elements of the two games still factually exist. (Some of which having devolved significantly. But you'll never see, in this time period, a moe-blob RPG downvoted in the mainstream sites for horrible story/characters because Japan is 'Mai waifus!!' and America is 'Criticism = Censorship! ...also, mai waifus!'.)

??? Cannon (No one knows yet if this is the original cannon or the Rebirth cannon)Shin Jigen Game Neptune VII

__________________________________

Also, whoever said the series has gotten better has liiiiied. XP I just traded in Re;Birth 1&2 after barely touching the second. I couldn't quite put my finger on what the biggest drain was until just yesterday and my wife agreed with the sentiment.

Neptunia's plot has effectively deleted all character conflict because it gets in the way of them being 'perfect waifus'.

Just compare the original Neptunia to Re;Birth1 in this one element for example. In that one all the CPUs were relatively hostile to Neptune at first and that tension slowly wore down over the course of the entire game. Re;Birth1? You get many...5 second of wariness. Then it's gone. For no reason then just to rug-sweep it. To add to the problems...

Dungeons are just as bland, samey, and recycled as the original.

Grinding is still nightmarish, and good luck unlocking gear without a guide for which monsters to farm for drops because that crap gets convoluted quickly.

Dialog is still extremely hit or miss in the humor department.

Pandering fanservice has gotten 'worse' in that it utterly annihilates characterization. (I.E: IF used to be the 'straight man' of the group to counter balance the nonsensical humor vibe in the original. Now as soon as you meet Vert she devolves into "...booooooobs...*drools*" as her only trait for the rest of the entire game.)

Combat is still 'mash Square to win, tactics aren't needed.', despite using a completely revamped system.

Transformations have actually gotten WORSE because there's no longer any fun 'Sailor Moon' esque scene where you get to see your different parts snap on. Just a flash of light and 'done'.______________________

Think roughly 6pm CST I'm going to try streaming a fresh run of Xenoverse. So if you want to see how this plays out from a pure rookie's experience (with minimum fighter and brawler experience) then feel free to pop in. I don't use cam or any of those annoying 'stalker systems' modern streamers use. Just good old fashioned keyboard chat room replies.

twitch.tv/sakuriono

Do note though, depending on what Xeno's Devs decided to censor out for the broadcasting system the stream might end as soon as it starts. There's every possibility they decided to forbid the audio on anything but the opening menu and multiplayer because...logic? (Sorry, WO3U's made me paranoid now.)

Is SE trying to appeal to the edgemaster audience now? I mean, this and reading about the importance of gore in FF XV.

After the stinkbomb that was the XIII-series they're probably going for that 'western audience appeal'. Which unless your dev team leader's name is 'Keiji Inafune' means using the worst stereotypes of that region as your inclusivity factor. So for us Americans it means the guns, gore, and (judging by the way they dress the mechanic in XV) rednecks are in full swing as 'ways we can make them buy this game'.

That's neither me being sarcastic nor rude neither. Nor Japan being rude. Even in today's multi-cultural internet society the majority of Japanese use harsh cultural cliches when trying to appeal or reference the outside world because the 'island nation' mindset is still very real and sadly a majority thought process. They merely don't know anything else about 'the west' other than that.

Burned what little of my old gen collection remained to upgrade to a PS4. First time in a while I've been rather enamored by a machine simply turning it. It's quite a beautiful beasty. Immediately went to test the Twitch Streaming feature and met with massive disappointment. Apparently Devs can chose to block certain aspects of the game from live streaming...including the entirety of the audio files.

Good luck trying to make playing Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate enjoyable with zero music or sound effects...the hell Koei!?

On the plus side it looks like Xenoverse works fairly well...got sound but it seems like the opening movie is blocked. It forcefully pauses your broadcast while it plays...which worries me about what ELSE might be blocked.

Maybe I'll give it a first time attempt tomorrow and post the link around here in advance, just so we can all see what hoops Sony thinks are fun to make its players jump through for basic functionality.

Not just the subject matter but that has to be one of the worst written books I've ever tried to read that wasn't self published.

....:-\ Why do people do this?

Y'all know it's bad beforehand. It was written to be garbage. It was marketed specially as garbage. It will never be anything other than garbage.

Yet they still ignore the other legitimate writers, who're very much fighting to stay sane all the while, out there and burn their finite time (and possibly money) on something they know will make them miserable.

Not sure people know exactly how much mental damage this causes struggling novelists every time they have to see yet another "Oh I just read the WORST book ever...on purpose. Lawls."

(Not picking on you specifically Au, you're hardly the only one who does this.)

I ask because to me P4's MC was designed to be as plain/flat as possible for maximum malleability. He's pretty much cut and polished to be the most generic student possible, from his non reactive attitude (except where guided by the player for extreme over reactions) to being clean, cut, and polished to look like a harmless honor student.

In fact Atlus themselves joke about this with how they wrote the MC for Persona 4: The Animation. They intentionally have him carry about as much emotional re-activeness as a piece of wood. It works to great humor effect mind you, but that's pretty much the creators outright poking fun at their own 'lack' of a creation.

So I do ask in honest inquisitiveness since perhaps another point of view picked up on something I didn't...or maybe it was subtle sarcasm in hindsight. Not sure. ...I knew I should've leveled up Understanding today. Damn cranes.

I dunno based on the picture Mickeymac92 posted, it looks to me like Izanagi....w/e (Idachi's version) with a slight recolor and a hat. Although part of that is because the wings look like they are just background elements due to the framing. I don't dislike it, but it feels a lot like an evilish version of Izanagi to me.

Also totally willing to bet that this MC will end up being a 'shonen blank slate' just as much as the last two. :p

It'll probably look less so in the game but holy **** the MC's base persona is a scary looking bugger inn'it he? I quite dig it after the rather generic looks of Orpheus and Izanagi. You can actually tell the MC is going to have some depth to him instead of 'generic shonen blank slate' the last two have been (accurately reflected by Orph's and Iza's plainness.)

Hrmm, a bit wary already. In those menus I see the 'Weapon' and 'Gun' are different options. Which makes it seem like they're going back to the combat styles of Persona 1 & 2 where that was a thing. And honestly I never cared for that division of gear at all.

Then there's only a single female party member...*sigh* There's that stink of Shonen in the air. Hope it's just a whiff from the FFXV dev team next door._____________

But really if it can overcome these two minor bumps the game looks pretty amazing.

I found any character in Re:Birth 1 that wasn't a main character to be pretty much garabage (not counting MAGES. in some situations, and the Candidates when you finally get them leveled up). I basically used Neptune, Compa, and IF for most of the game, eventually replacing IF for Blanc's ungodly VIT and Compa for Vert when I realized Compa's healing doesn't make up for her low survivability and items are a fine way to heal anyway.

Alas that has less to do with the characters being garbage and IF (the company) having a very poor design sense when it comes to gear scaling. The main trio get a slew of upgrades both in shop, in treasure, and in plans. Everyone else has to rely on untimely drops (the other three CPUs) or shop updates (which give you things of less power than what you can craft for the Trio five minutes later). You'll notice that between giving anyone not Neptune the item 'Histy's Bookmark' and the shop properly giving everyone an equal opportunity at good gear in a New Game+ run, that everyone's damage is pretty much equal. Throw in the NG+ Coliseum gear and there you go; suddenly Tekken hits harder than transformed Noire.

...but at that point you realize the game's over and the extra content is boring as crap so just quick-grab the True Ending and move on.

Funny timing, considering I was just having this grumble not last night even...

Hyperdimension Neptunia Rebirth 1&2

So let me get this straight....you've giving me 20+ characters per game to chose from...and the combat uses THREE ACTIVE PARTY SLOTS!? (Four in 2, not that it helps much.)

...>.<; Ai yah...

It doesn't help matters, at least in 1 so far, that they literally dump about 6-7 new characters on you in a single sitting at game's end. Good luck sorting through that mess.

Wild Arms XF & Final Fantasy Tactics

XF had this problem more so than FFT but fundamentally the same issue occurs. Story Characters vs Full Customs. Since I love making my own units it's always a frustrating problem to cherry pick down to which ones I want to keep for the final formation. Usually this changes slightly on each revisit so I can't really say I have a set I just lock into by default.

Then this issue compounds when you have troubles decided on active CLASS on top of active character. In FFT it more comes from overload, since unless you're using a guide you're constantly wanting to max things out and discover what new classes can be obtained with just the right combinations. In XF it comes from that, unless you've done some serious grinding, the rate at which you obtain your core classes far, far outpaces the rate in which you can max them. I want to say I've never fully beaten the game, but in my deepest run only had about 1.75 per character out of the 12 total options (13 for main characters) topped out.

As an odd note, I never have this problem with Disgaea. Despite the shedload of DLC it drops on you. I always can trim it down to a Top 9 no problem.

"Hey, pick your favorite between two branching ending characters... Oh, you've chosen? Great! Here's an amazing option #3. ...now pick again. <3 Oh, and if you're playing the sequel let's hide some of the crucial events to #3 just so you have to do this again for access."

....fuuuuuuuuuu-*beep*

Star Ocean 2

Let's play the denial game~!

Do you like that Dragon-toting guy you see early? Be careful~. We'll lock you out of all the Tetrageniots if you pick him.

"*beep*!"

Bowman seems pretty chill right? And things are urgent so why don't you hurry along with his quest and pick him up...oh, I forgot to mention that for doing that we're shutting you out of rocket punch girl~.

"*beep* *beep*!!"

Oh, have you been picking up every character you can like a normal RPG? Silly gamer...we're going to shut you out of the strongest character in the game because of that. And if you were even foolish enough to play this on PSP let's add ANOTHER character to utterly shut down those precious end-story slots. <3

"*beep* a *beep*ing monkey with a *horn*ing stick on a-!"

*cut transmission*

Final Fantasy 7

You know oddly enough I thought this would be a franchise with that issue cropping up more often.

1-5, 10-2, 13-2, 13-3: Not enough characters at one time to be an problem. (Yes I know 4's PSP Remake's Post-Game. But you've already beaten the game, so it doesn't quite count.)

6: I honestly though this would be my pick. But really...it's never been an issue. Terra, Celes, Shadow, Sabin, done! I think it has more to do with everyone else just feeling more situational than not in combat.

8, 10, 12: Less a problem of 'who to pick' as 'who to pick this playthrough'. These all have systems that turn the characters into carbon clones anyway. Although 8 gets away with it a bit more since the limit breaks have far more character-charm to them. But since everyone's interchangeable I never stress over it.

9: I can see this being a problem for others. But none of the cast really grabbed me. And in the case of some like Steiner getting their best weapon creates so much hassle that I just never play them for that reason alone.

And then we go back to Final Fantasy 7...

I could use Aeris...but that'd be a time waste...but I still wanna.Tifa has fun combos.Cait Sith is goofy yet adorable.Red XIII is just <333.Yufie and Vincent always get hidden-character points on top of being good to begin with.Barret gets the Mr T-knock-off award.

...what do you mean I can't get rid of Cloud permanently? I'll trade him out for Aeris! Please! Oh come on, it's the DLC-Micro-Trans era. I'll pay you $2 for another party slot~.

Grandia...Xtreme

No, really. Dipped in red for probably being the hardest character decision game ever for me. There's just so many good choices and fun combos that you want to use them all. But due to the grindy nature of the game and the looooong treck through the End-Game+ dungeon you really don't often want to do rolling playthroughs. You pretty much pick your team then start optimizing them for half a month with no looking back. There is no horse-swapping here, mostly due to perm-stat boosting food investments.

Titto always has to make the cut because he's the only one who can steal. And bosses drop some goood crap.Myam fights for a spot due to her AoE egg-less healing. Her abilities suck in the water temple but once you get past that she's golden.Carmine, Bradol, and Ulk all fight for the 'bruiser' position and really it can be a hard sell for one over the other.Jaid is a mage who can take a hit. Let me repeat that due to it's rarity...a MAGE...with ENDURANCE...holy crap.

I can't even make the 'get rid of the main character' joke here because you NEVER toss the PC with Sky Dragon Slash in a Grandia title.

So once you're done sifting through all that mess, spending the first third of the game getting used to your final set up, guess what?

Surprise! Extra character Lutina! Hope you're ready to play the trimming round again!